Saturday, November 8, 2014

Some Comments on the Creation Week: Day 6a

And
God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his
kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his
kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his
kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon
the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

(Gen
1:24-25)

Day
6 is divided into two events: the creation of terrestrial animals and
the creation of man. In this post, I will deal with the creation of
terrestrial animals and will discuss the creation of man in my next
post.

And
God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his
kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his
kind: and it was so.

The
first clause, “Let the earth bring forth
the living creature after his kind,” seems broad enough
to include all types of land animals. The next passage, though,
roughly divides terrestrial animals into three groups: cattle,
creeping things, and beasts of the earth. This may not be meant as
an exhaustive list of the types of animals but it seems sufficiently
broad enough to include most types of animals.

Cattle:
most scholars agree that “cattle” is a term meant to include all
domesticated animals. This may mean that God created certain animals
with the expressed purpose of them being of service to man or simply
it is simply a description of those animals which are easily
domesticated. In other passages, cattle are sometimes referred to as
“beasts of the field.”

We
know with certainty that all living creatures were initially
herbivorous (Genesis 1:29-30) so we did not need these animals to be
food. However, I'm not sure if the ban on eating meat would have
forbade things like drinking milk so maybe we could have still milked
cows. Had man not fallen, we could have become farmers so perhaps
the ox might be used to help us plow. We also might have begun
building things so we could have used animals to carry heavy loads or
maybe carry us (as in horses). Of course, we also keep animals for
companionship.

The
initial, temperate environment of the earth and the lack of things
like thorns meant there was no need for clothing. Neither would we
have eaten animals so many of the reasons we now have for
domesticating animals would not have been necessary then – no need
for wool, eggs, leather, hunting, etc. Perhaps God, in His
omniscience and foreknowledge of the Fall, created these animals
knowing we will someday need them.

Beasts
of the earth: This is nearly unanimously understood to be wild
animals. However, this begs the question: if pre-Fall animals were
neither predators nor prey, then what substantial difference could
there have been between “domestic” and “wild” animals?

I'm
a dog lover, personally, because dogs are loyal companions with an
uncanny ability to respond to non-verbal cues from their masters.
Dogs seem able to understand what we're thinking or how we feel.
Cats are only barely domesticated. My daughter seems to think she
has trained her cat to sit but I know the cat thinks it has trained
my daughter to feed it just by sitting down. We may keep small cats
as pets but they still scratch and bite us. We don't keep large cats
because they are dangerous and could kill us. I say all that just to
say that Adam could have kept a large dog as a pet but he could also
have kept a large cat. There would have been no difference between a
wild or domestic cat.

The
Bible says that after the Flood, God put an instinctive fear of man
into the beasts of the earth (Genesis 9:2). This could be a
reference to only those specific “wild” animals on the Ark who
had become accustomed to Noah during their year-long sequestering
together. Or it could mean that even after the Fall, animals still
had a natural trust of man which God intended to end after the Flood.
Therefore, the designation of “wild” did not begin until after
the Fall and eventually became fully realized after the Flood. The
initial distinction between wild and domestic in Genesis is a
prophetic description of their post-Fall condition.

Creeping
things: Stong's Exhaustive Concordance (word
# 7431 remes) defines this as “a reptile or any other
rapidly moving animal -- that creepeth, creeping (moving) thing.”
A characteristic of reptiles is their sprawling gate which
distinguishes them from mammals and dinosaurs whose gate is erect.
“Creeping” seems an especially accurate description of reptiles.

Other
disagree. Some have suggested “cattle” and “beasts” are both
references to only larger animals while creeping things include
smaller animals like rodents. People in this camp would include
larger reptiles with “beasts of the earth” while maintaining that
smaller reptiles like snakes and lizards would be included in
“creeping things.” Still others argue that all reptiles are
“beasts of the earth” while “creeping things” means insects
and other, small invertebrates.

The
strict classification of creatures is interesting in a scholarly way
but is not of critical importance to understanding salvation. One
important note is that verse 30 identifies beasts of the earth, fowls
(winged creatures), and creeping things as “having life.” These
creatures (whatever they may include) were created with nephesh life.
There was neither hunter nor hunted prior to the Fall since all
living creatures ate plants. Death came only after Adam's sin.

And
God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after
their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his
kind:

As
was the case with plants, marine animals, and flying creatures, God
created the terrestrial animals in groups of “kinds.” The beasts
had kinds, the cattle had kinds, and the creeping things had kinds.
This contradicts evolutionary theory which holds that all
quadruped-animals are descended from a single, common ancestor.

and
God saw that it was good.

Finally,
we see that creation of the terrestrial animals, like every other
creature, was good. It was not the end product of millions of years
of death, struggle, and survival of the fittest that brought marine
animals onto shore and gave them legs.

2 comments:

We know with certainty that all living creatures were initially herbivorous ... [t]here was neither hunter nor hunted prior to the Fall since all living creatures ate plants.

I'm trying to picture a frugivorous boa constrictor or a vegetarian rattlesnake, and it's not quite working. Both have exquisite adaptions for preying on other animals that would be quite useless to an herbivore (would a pit viper use its heat sensors to track leaves and shoots, or a constrictor wrap around a small melon to suffocate it?). The sharp teeth and short guts (adapted to digesting animal flesh, not the harder-to-digest vegetable matter that longer guts are adapted for) of cats large and small also seem optimized for predation, not a vegetarian lifestyle. Were all these animals created pre-adapted for a post-Fall lifestyle (and hence rather ill-adapted for a pre-Fall one), or did God do a lot of retrofitting after expelling Adam and Eve from the garden?

There would have been no difference between a wild or domestic cat. The Bible says that after the Flood, God put an instinctive fear of man into the beasts of the earth (Genesis 9:2).

Typically, the difference between domesticated animals and wild ones is that humans control the breeding of domestic ones (hence, some oft-tamed animals, like cheetahs and elephants, can't really be domesticated because they require either too much time or too much space for their normal breeding cycle).

On the other hand, Dmitry Belaev's work in domesticating the silver fox (between 1959 and today) suggests that indeed, the main work of domestication is first getting animals to stop being afraid of or hostile to human contact, and later to actually enjoy it. But there are side effects of this: the domestic silver foxes are no longer silver, but mottled black or brown and white, and have a number of dog-like features of their behavior that make them very un-fox-like.

This recalls an observation by Charles Darwin that there is scarcely any domestic mammal that does not have spotted varieties (even if the wild type is solid-colored), or breeds with such oddities as folded ears. There are a consistent set of differences between wild and domestic mammals that suggest that domestication selected for juvenile ("childlike") traits in behavior, and this selection resulted in other changes as well that weren't specifically sought but were caused by the same genetic changes as the behavioral alterations. Anyway, all domestic animals have living or extinct (e.g. the aurochs, for cows) wild counterparts from which they appear to have been bred selectively over time.

I concede that it is hard to imagine a world without death when our entire frame of reference is limited this world of death. It's probably much harder for you since you can only see the world through the paradigm of evolution and millions of years of struggle and death. It might help if you remind yourself that the animals we observe now are the product of thousands of years of adaptation. The created animals might have be OK hunters or had OK defenses but the best hunters lived to reproduce and the worse hunters starved. They prey that could elude being eaten reproduced and the prey that couldn't died. What we're left with are animals that are the most cunning hunters and the ones with the best defenses.

Remember too that God not only cursed Adam but also cursed Adam's domain. God told Adam that he would earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; that he would plow the ground and it would yield thorns. Things like thorns and venom would not have been exhibited before the Fall but perhaps were present as latent genes which would become expressed after Adam's sin.

I've written before about the Russian experiment with the foxes. In less than eight generations, the foxes began to exhibit similar characteristics to domestic dogs – floppy ears, spotted coats, barking, tail wagging, etc. The reason for the mottled coats among domestic animals are likely two fold. First, there is the removal of selective pressure that selects for solid or well camouflaged coats. Second, there possibly is a connection between the genes that regulate docility and the genes that regulate fur color. When artificial selection selects one, the other also becomes expressed.

RKBentley

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